Internet websites routinely permit users to register with the website for a variety of reasons, such as email services, auction events, online polling, and gaming. With the advent of so many services being provided via the Internet, some users are employing computer programs (e.g., bots, netbots, etc.) to automatically register plural times at a single website in order to commercially exploit and/or abuse the services. For example, software may be used to automatically register for thousands of free email accounts, which may be subsequently used in sending spam email. As another example, software may be used to automatically register at websites in order to post comments into blogs for the purpose of inserting keywords into the website to artificially raise search engine rankings. As an even further example, software may be used to automatically register over and over again at a website to submit thousands of votes in an online poll. Such automated, software-based registration is typically used for commercial promotion and/or other purposes, and often degrades the quality of service for legitimate users.
A number of tools have been developed to combat automated registration to avoid such abuse. The tools typically involve a challenge that is easily answered by a human user but difficult for a computer to answer. One such tool is to ask random questions that must be answered to obtain access to the website. Another tool is referred to as a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), which is a type of challenge-response test used in computing as an attempt to ensure that the response is generated by a person. The CAPTCHA process usually involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade. Because other computers are assumed to be unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human. A common type of CAPTCHA requires the user to type letters or digits from a distorted image that appears on the screen.
Tools such as CAPTCHA have slowed but not eliminated unwanted automated registration. This is because methods have been devised for circumventing CAPTCHA-like tools. For example, software programs have been developed that can recognize and answer the earliest types of CAPTCHA tests using, for example, computer-based segmentation and optical character recognition techniques. Also, some CAPTCHA implementations use only a small fixed pool of CAPTCHA images, and storing matched sets of query and solution can be used to bypass the tool for small sets of queries. Lastly, low cost human operators can be used to answer plural website registration challenges on a massive scale.
Current technology thus does not adequately prevent or limit bots and humans from repetitive registrations on a website. Although CAPTCHA, random question, and other tools slow automated registration, these tools do not eliminate automated registration and do not detect fraudulent (e.g., plural) registrations by a single user.